Shep

By the levee of the Missouri River in Fort Benton, Mont., stands a bronze statue of a vigilant sheepdog. It commemorates Shep, a dog who appeared at the town’s Great Northern Railway Station one day in August 1936 while workers were loading a casket onto a train. The dog watched the train depart, then turned and trotted off down the tracks.

Thereafter, for five and a half years, Shep would appear on the platform to meet four trains a day, scanning the passengers who alighted and then retiring under the platform. His master still had not returned when in January 1942 he slipped on the rails and disappeared under an engine.

A cynic might wonder how much of this story is tied up in Montana tourism. But plausible it certainly is: Essentially the same thing had happened 12 years earlier in Japan.

| Oddities

“Cross Purposes”

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It was customary with Frederick the Great of Prussia, whenever a new soldier appeared in his guards, to ask him three questions–viz., ‘How old are you? How long have you been in my service? Are you satisfied with your pay and treatment?’ It happened that a young soldier, born in France, and who had served in his own country, desired to enlist into the Prussian service, and his figure was such as to cause him immediately to be accepted. He was totally ignorant of the German language, but his captain gave him notice that the King would question him in that language the first time he saw him, and therefore cautioned him to learn by heart the three answers he was to give. The soldier learned them by the next day, and as soon as he appeared in the ranks Frederick came up to interrogate him. His Majesty, however, happened to begin with the second question first, and asked him, ‘How long have you been in my service?’ ‘Twenty-one years,’ answered the soldier. The king, struck with his youth, which plainly indicated he had not borne a musket near so long as that, said to him, much astonished, ‘How old are you?’ ‘One year, an’t please your Majesty.’ Frederick, still more astonished, cried, ‘You or I must certainly be bereft of our senses.’ The soldier, who took this for the third question, replied firmly, ‘Both, an’t please your Majesty.’ ‘This is the first time I ever was treated as a madman at the head of my army,’ rejoined Frederick. The soldier, who had exhausted his stock of German, stood silent; and when the king again addressed him, in order to penetrate the mystery, the soldier told him in French that he did not understand a word of German. The king laughed heartily, and after exhorting him to perform his duty, left him.

— E. Shelton, ed., The Book of Battles, 1867

| History

The Cleve Cartmill Affair

In 1943, writer Cleve Cartmill proposed a story about a futuristic bomb to John W. Campbell, the editor of Astounding Science Fiction. Campbell liked the idea and gave him some background material on fission devices and uranium-235.

The story, “Deadline,” ran in Campbell’s March 1944 issue — and shortly brought a visit from the FBI. Apparently the technical details in Cartmill’s story had some uncomfortable resonances with the top-secret Manhattan Project, then under way at Los Alamos:

Two cast-iron hemispheres, clamped over the orange segments of cadmium alloy. And the fuse–I see it is in–a tiny can of cadmium in a beryllium holder and a small explosive powerful enough to shatter the cadmium walls. Then–correct me if I’m wrong, will you?–the powdered uranium oxide runs together in the central cavity. The radium shoots neutrons into this mass–and the U-235 takes over from there. Right?

Campbell explained that he’d studied atomic physics at MIT and had drawn the research from unclassified journals. In the end the authorities were satisfied — but they asked him not to publish any more stories on nuclear technology.

See The War Ahead and Five Down.

| History · Oddities

Misc

  • Georgia, Massachusetts, and Connecticut didn’t ratify the Bill of Rights until 1939.
  • Wilt Chamberlain never fouled out of a game.
  • 3864 = 3 × (-8 + 64)
  • What’s the opposite of “not in”?
  • Alaska has a longer coastline than all other U.S. states combined.
  • “To do nothing is also a good remedy.” — Hippocrates
| History · Quotations · Science & Math · Trivia

Stork Fatigue

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When Silvia Morello de Palma was seven months pregnant, she flew to Antarctica to join her husband, the commander of Argentina’s Esperanza research base.

When their son, Emilio Marcos Palma, was born safely on Jan. 7, 1978, he became the world’s southernmost birth — and the only person in recorded history to be the firstborn on a continent.

| Trivia

A Half-Made Man

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From The Strand Magazine, August 1909:

The above photographs show front and side views of a fancy dress representing ‘Half-an’-‘Arf’. The costume was prepared in three evenings during spare time, and the dress suit was in no way altered or damaged, all the tramp-side garments being superstructed. There is a nine days’ beard on one side of the face, the hair being combed with isinglass to make it stand up. The face and arm are stained and made up with powders to look exactly like a natural tramp’s complexion minus the dirt. The boot is an old hand-sewn one, made up with painted and stained brown paper, with a hole in front from which a piece of tow protruded. The whole costume cost about a shilling to produce, and was a great success at more than one dance.

| Oddities

No Vacancy

Room 308 of the Samudra Beach Hotel in West Java is reserved for the Indonesian goddess Nyai Loro Kidul.

The hotel stands near the cliff from which folktales say a young girl flung herself and became Queen of the South Sea. While praying beneath a nearby ketapang tree in the early 1960s, President Sukarno received the message that a hotel might be built on the spot if a room were reserved for the jealous sea goddess.

The room is decorated in green, her favorite color.

| Oddities

Everybody’s a Comedian

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In the ‘Old India House’ may still be seen a quarto volume of Interest Tables, on the fly-leaf of which is written, in Charles Lamb’s round, clerkly hand,–
‘A book of much interest.’–Edinburgh Review
‘A work in which the interest never flags.’–Quarterly Review
‘We may say of this volume, that the interest increases from the beginning to the end.’–Monthly Review

— Charles Carroll Bombaugh, Gleanings for the Curious From the Harvest-Fields of Literature, 1890

| Literature

Inksmanship

In 1863, the register of the U.S. Treasury, L.E. Chittenden, had to sign 12,500 bonds in a single weekend to stop the delivery of two British-built warships to the Confederacy. He started at noon on Friday and managed 3,700 signatures in the first seven hours, but by Saturday morning he was desperate:

[E]very muscle on the right side connected with the movement of the hand and arm became inflamed, and the pain was almost beyond endurance. … In the slight pauses which were made, rubbing, the application of hot water, and other remedies were resorted to, in order to alleviate the pain and reduce the inflammation. They were comparatively ineffectual, and the hours dragged on without bringing much relief.

He finished, exhausted, at noon on Sunday, completing a mountain of bonds more than 6 feet high. These were rushed to a waiting steamer — and only then did word come that the English warships had been sold to a different buyer. The bonds, in the end, were not needed.

See “Counting a Million in a Month.”

| History